Among the respondents were 450 senior executives from customer experience, customer service, IT, marketing and sales departments at 150 companies.

The survey included participants from Australia, China, France, Germany, India, the Netherlands, the UK and the United States.

Capgemini used the industry-standard Net Promoter Score, or NPS — an index ranging from minus-100 to plus-100 — to measure the willingness of customers to recommend a company’s products or services.

Capgemini’s Digital Transformation Institute created a DCX index based on the evaluations of organizations across 80 different digital experience attributes, ranging from the ability to view and edit personal data to personalizing products and services on mobile devices.

While 75 percent of business representatives believed their companies were customer-centric, only 30 percent of consumers viewed companies that way, the study found.

Utilities and consumer products companies were the most out of sync with their customers, while Internet service companies and their customers were most in step, setting the bar for other organizations, Capgemini found.

The Digital Imperative

For consumers, digital operations are key to meeting expectations, Capgemini said. Consumers are willing to spend 0.6 percent more for each single point increase in a company’s DCX index score, and its NPS also increases by nearly five points.

Over the past three years, closely tying business operations with customer experience gave a company a 14-point NPS advantage and doubled the NPS point increase compared to those that did not.

About 30 percent of businesses said they faced a challenge keeping up with the rapidly evolving technology landscape and consumers’ digital expectations.

The most important takeaway from the survey is that “there’s such a big disconnect between what the companies believe their loyalty score should be and what it is,” said Rob Enderle, principal analyst at the Enderle Group.

Digital Transformation Issues

There are a number of IT challenges for companies attempting to go digital:

The rapidly evolving technology landscape, according to 58 percent of respondents;

Rising consumer expectations, according to 57 percent;

Difficulty integrating disparate platforms, according to 38 percent; and

Poor user interfaces, according to 32 percent.

Forty-one percent of business respondents said their firms had no dedicated customer experience budget, and 35 percent cited lack of internal ownership of the digital customer experience.

Companies thinking of implementing a digital customer experience should be looking very closely at artificial intelligence, said Doug Heise, VP of global marketing at CoreMedia.

“In the next few years, it may be the thing that makes or breaks your company,” he told CRM Buyer.

Given enough time and people, it’s easy to produce a custom digital experience for any visitor, or create a custom landing page that reflects emerging trends, hot styles or trending news, Heise said.

However, online trends come and go “at lightning speeds,” he noted, and the number of customers demanding relevant real-time experiences is growing. “Combine these two trends, and you’ve got a nightmare situation for marketers and e-commerce managers.”

AI not only helps resolve these issues, but “it’s also about massive scalability and massively increased efficiency,” Heise pointed out.

On the other hand, “going digital without understanding why customers are ranking you down for loyalty would be a mistake,” Enderle told CRM Buyer.

The survey’s core finding is that firms that focus on loyalty and use digital technologies to close the gap did better, Enderle noted.

“This isn’t multiple choice,” he remarked. “The focus on loyalty is the more important driver. Digital isn’t a magic pill that fixes bad customer practices.”

SOS Children’s Villages work to prevent family breakdown and care for children who have lost parental care, or who risk losing it. They work with communities, partners and states to ensure that the rights of all children, in every society, are respected and fulfilled.

In particular they do extensive work to protect vulnerable children associated with the gold mining industry in Africa. As such it is incumbent upon the founders of iPayGuru to support such a charity and we encourage you to do the same.

Did you know ?

The Internet is the global system of interconnected computer networks that use the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to link devices worldwide.

Approximately 3.2 billion people use the internet. Out of this, 1.7 billion of internet users are Asians. In fact, it is estimated that approximately 200 billion emails and 3 billion Google search would have to wait if the internet goes down for a day.

30,000 websites are hacked every day. Highly effective computer software programs are used by cybercriminals to automatically detect vulnerable websites which can be hacked easily.

First webcam was created at the University Of Cambridge to monitor the Trojan coffee pot. A live 128×128 grayscale picture of the state of the coffee pot was provided as the video feed.

Internet sends approximately 204 million emails per minute and 70% of all the mails sent are spam. 2 billion electrons are required to produce a single email.

First tweet was done on 21st March, 2006 by Jack Dorsey and the first YouTube video to be uploaded was “Meet At Zoo” at 8:27 p.m. on Saturday, April 23, 2005 by Jawed Karim.

The majority of internet traffic is not generated by humans, but by bots and malware. According to a recent study conducted by Incapsula, 61.5% or nearly two-thirds of all the website traffic is caused by Internet bots.

In 2005, broadband internet had a maximum speed of 2 Megabits per second. Today, 100Mbps download speeds are available in many parts of the country. But experts warn that science has reached its limit and fiber optics can take no more data.

The first spam email was sent in 1978 over ARPNET by a guy named Gary Thuerk. He was selling computers.

Online shoppers can buy cars, clothes and millions of other things with the click of a button and figurative swipe of a credit card. In fact, U.S. consumers spend $1,200-$1,300 per year online, but that number will increase by 44%, to $1,738, by 2016. In that year, ecommerce sales are expected to hit $327 billion.

By 2016 the total transaction value of mobile payments in the U.S. hit $62.24 billion. The user base is still relatively small, with only 7.9 million users in 2012. Usage should grow during the next few years to over 50 million mobile payment users by 2017.

51% of people who did not complete a purchase on a mobile device stopped because they did not feel comfortable entering their credit card details

81 percent of people research online before buying it either offline or online.

Only 60 percent of people use search engines to search the products, the rest 40 percent directly land on the ecommerce portals or have direct links

An average online shopper visits the target platform at least 3 times before finalizing the product.

33 percent of online sales take place after 6PM, likely due to the fact that people get back from offices around then, giving them some private time to think of themselves and their needs.